ABSTRACT

Global civil society is widely celebrated for promising political action on a global scale and, by extension, for offering the best hope for the ‘civilisation’ of the world order. The key approaches all seek to move beyond ‘Westphalia’ (state sovereignty), and see global civil society as having a crucial part to play in this transformatory project. Richard Falk, for example, suggests that global civil society ‘recasts our understanding of sovereignty’ as ‘the modernist stress on territorial sovereignty as the exclusive basis for political community and identity [is] displaced both by more local and distinct groupings and by association with the reality of a global civil society without boundaries’ (1995: 100). Ronnie Lipschutz also sees the transnational political networks put in place by actors in civil society as ‘challenging, from below, the nation-state system’. Indeed, ‘the growth of global civil society represents an ongoing project of civil society to reconstruct, re-imagine, or re-map world politics’ (1992: 391).